British physicist Mark Thomson has been elected the next director general of the European particle physics laboratory, CERN. The appointment, approved this Wednesday by the organization’s board, will begin on January 1, 2026 and will last five years.
CERN has been Europe’s leading particle physics laboratory for 70 years and has delivered countless far-reaching innovations, from pioneering work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the invention of the World Wide Web, as well as experimental validation. of Sir Peter Higgs’ theories in 2012 through the discovery of the Higgs boson. The next Director General will set CERN’s direction at a critical time, when key decisions must be made to establish its next major project.
Thomson is currently Chief Executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the United Kingdom and Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Cambridge. He has dedicated much of his career to CERN, where he initially contributed to precision measurements of the W and Z bosons in the 1990s, as part of the OPAL experiment at CERN’s Large Electron-Positron Collider. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, he has been a member of the ATLAS collaboration.
Since completing his PhD in particle physics at the University of Oxford, Professor Thomson has played an important role in advancing neutrino physics and research for future colliders. It has also played a key role in the design and optimization of detectors for future colliders, particularly for linear electron-positron colliders such as the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC).
Mark Thomson appears in over 1,000 scientific publications and has held a variety of national and international research leadership and oversight roles, including UK delegate to the CERN Council since 2018.
mysteries of the universe
“Congratulations to Professor Mark Thomson on his election as the next Director General of CERN from January 2026,” CERN Council President Eliezer Rabinovici said in a statement. “The exceptional qualities displayed by Mark Thomson give the CERN Council confidence that he will successfully take his place in the list of visionary Directors General who have guided CERN.”
“Mark Thomson is a talented physicist with extensive management experience,” said CERN’s current director general, Fabiola Gianotti. “I have had the opportunity to collaborate with him in various contexts over the past few years and I am confident that he will be an excellent CEO. “I am pleased to hand over this important role to him at the end of 2025.”
For Thomson, CERN “is a model of scientific excellence and innovation that provides world leadership.” Its mission is “to unravel the mysteries of the universe, contributing to our collective search for knowledge,” he said. The organization “promises revolutionary research and discoveries that will shape our understanding of physics and, in doing so, inspire future generations of young scientists. I am honored to become Director General of CERN and am committed to pursuing the organization’s scientific mission, further developing technologies that will benefit society as a whole, while uniting nations in a shared commitment to advance science for the betterment of humanity.
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